__blockcipher__

Worsening acne vulgaris

Worsening rosacea

Difficulty communicating with the hard of hearing, language learners, etc

Reduced ability to convey info via facial expressions

Altered risk appraisal

Having to stand closer or speak louder to convo partner

Psychological discomfort

Bacterial pneumonia

Cross-contamination (hand to mask, mask to hand, hand to face)

Mild negatives from uncomfortable pressure on ears

Sends a message of societal fear that there is something to be afraid of (you might consider this a positive, I don’t personally)

Encourages viewing the wearer as just a vector for disease

Increased CO2 buildup

Literally wrote one of the most famous evidence-based papers in the world about why most interventions don’t work. But Gibbon1 said he’s not a credible source because he doesn’t like his conclusions even though he works with the WHO to publish global SARS/2 IFR research. Got it, I’ll perform a bayesian update with this new info.

...Hmm, weird, my posteriors didn’t change at all.

I think a review of the relevant literature shows that it quite obviously is, but I’m about to go to sleep and don’t want to fight that battle thus why I’m trying to direct your attention to the actual point.

So let’s try again:

If you take it as a given that SARS-2 primarily spreads via aerosols, what does that imply about the efficacy of strapping a warm, damp piece of cloth over your breathing holes?

To be clear, I agree. I think the whole concept of source control is silly. Actually I’ll go one step further and say I think the whole concept of trying to artificially slow transmission of SARS-2 in the general population is a bad idea period.

Right but imagine the same study but performed on 1 billion people for a much less lethal virus. That’s what we’re doing with this mass global vaccination campaign.

So yes, that is my concern. But I mainly mention it because it’s a handy counter to the utilitarian collectivist argumentation without having to argue against the ethics of collectivism itself.

Wow, what an intellectually dishonest description of your citation. It’s looking at interventions to promote condom usage, not condom usage.

Forgive my tone but...just wow.

It’s unfalsifiable because it requires studying a whole community and sequencing every SARS-2 infection to attribute “blame” to the source of the infection. That is very difficult to do and that is why such an RCT does not exist. And yet most of the world is performing this intervention anyway.

That’s the brilliance of “my mask protects you”. It’s not feasibly falsifiable. “My mask protects me” is very easy to falsify. That’s why we have one RCT that studied exactly that and failed to reach significance.

Again, the theoretical MoA of masking only makes sense if SARS-2 spreads via respiratory droplets. If it spreads via aerosols, the sub-micron aerosol particles stay aloft for minutes-hours and bypass the comparatively giant holes of the mask with ease. The sightly altered directional flow is largely irrelevant. You can watch any of the many videos of someone vaping with a mask on/off to see what I’m talking about. Imagine that every time you exhale.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/m20-6817 - Only community RCT of masking for SARS-2 ever performed. Failed to reach significance, bounds are from (in plain english) “slight-moderate worsening” to “moderate+ improvement” in transmission. Endpoint was self infection not source control. No RCT of source control for SARS-2 exists, and yet everyone in this thread besides me is advocating for usage of this unproven intervention, how curious.

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577?fbclid=IwAR1eSyc... - cluster-randomized controlled trial of masking in hcw. Compared cloth masking to “standard practice”, not a no-mask control, but results caution against usage of cloth masks due to abysmal filtration efficiency and the increased infections in the group relative to standard practice

I’d have to cite like 10 different studies to show the full story on aerosol transmission and I’m on mobile so I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader for now. But I’d like someone to at least answer this:

If you take it as fact that SARS-2 primarily spreads through aerosols, what does that imply about the efficacy of masking for source control of SARS-2? There is a reason that the health authorities advocating community usage of masks (which they never did for any respiratory pathogen pre-COVID btw) maintain that SARS-2 spreads through large respiratory droplets. It’s because otherwise the whole concept of community masking is absurd.

I live in California. I see maybe 95% cloth masks in public.

There is no RCT that shows cloth masks work any better than no mask. You’re relying on mechanistic studies at best (or crappy associative studies).

Masks incur costs; at a minimum you must admit they alter risk appraisal if nothing else.

Anyway, nobody in this thread has addressed the point that masks don’t even work in theory if aerosol transmission is the dominant transmission mode. That’s before accounting for the incredible cross contamination and misuse of masks that you see in the community.

> If that is true, what is remarkable is the low death rate.

Not sure what the implied IFR of your scenario is, but FWIW John Ioannidis has the global IFR at .15%. Furthermore SARS-2 is so incredibly age stratified wrt risk (something we conveniently ignore in public health mandates) that non-1st-world countries can have incredibly low death rates since fewer people survive to old age (and there is relatively less prevalence of diseases of modernity). Whereas the data I’ve seen for the increases in global poverty, child starvation, missed medical appointments and missed [non-COVID] vaccinations is staggering. Yet another cost of a one-size-fits-all approach taken across the globe.

Take a look through a dataset of COVID deaths and you’ll notice something that gets lip service but isn’t talked about nearly enough:

https://datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov/widgets/3trz-enys

Diseases of modernity.

Thanks. That was my thinking but glad to see it confirmed.

Kind of ironic that you’re not allowed to wear an N95 with an exhale valve, but are encouraged to wear a surgical mask, bandana, cloth mask, or dirty T-shirt, none of which provide any source control.

Again, the elephant in the room is respiratory viruses in general, and SARS-2 in particular, spread via aerosols. Non-N95 face coverings cannot block aerosols. Indeed mask wearing leads to deeper breaths to maintain homeostasis (this has been studied), therefore lead to a greater net volume of air, therefore lead to increased aerosol emission before even accounting for the potential to nebulize large droplets into a shower of tiny aerosol particles. But I digress.

The only RCT ever performed for self infection of SARS-2 in the community failed to reach significance. No RCT of community masking for SARS-2 transmission has ever been done, probably because it’s unfeasible (translation: we’ve constructed an unfalsifiable hypothesis).

Can you point me to a non mechanistic non associative study that demonstrates that face masks work to prevent community transmission of SARS-2?

EDIR: I can’t reply to the child comment about condoms (does HN have a nesting limit?) but suffice to say we only have 1 RCT on SARS-2 so playing the significance game is silly. You can’t point to a single RCT showing an effect because it doesn’t exist. That’s the problem. We’re mandating an intervention that is unproven to work and rests on theoretical assumptions that are now known to be false.

You can go look at non-SARS-2 RCTs if you want but those also look abysmal. For example go read Macintyre’s cluster-randomized controlled trial of cloth masks in healthcare workers. It’s not encouraging.

I would love for N95 usage to become more widespread, but that is hampered by the dogmatic clinging to the belief that cloth masks actually work, unfortunately.

Do N95s work for source control though? They certainly do work for self infection but I haven’t personally read any N95 studies on source control so am not sure.

Face masks couldn’t be doing that because they don’t work to slow transmission whatsoever. The whole theory of face masks - even before accounting for real world usage - rests on the assumption that the primary transmission mode is respiratory droplets and not aerosols which is not the case. They’re just medical security theater, except worse because they have obvious negatives. I advocate instead for performing rain dances; they’re no less effective but provide a bit of exercise to boot.

Anyway, on a related vein, non-infection-protecting vaccines can do exactly what you’re saying and select for more virulent/pathogenic strains. Take a look: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou.... Because all the COVID/19 vaccines do not prevent infection nor transmission (they reduce it but don’t fully block it), our incredibly shortsighted mass vaccination campaign is likely to select for more pathogenic strains. Go science!

> Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. Here we show experimentally that immunization of chickens against Marek's disease virus enhances the fitness of more virulent strains, making it possible for hyperpathogenic strains to transmit. Immunity elicited by direct vaccination or by maternal vaccination prolongs host survival but does not prevent infection, viral replication or transmission, thus extending the infectious periods of strains otherwise too lethal to persist. Our data show that anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts.

This might be obvious to most, but at first it wasn't clear to me why in 150 billion years the vast majority of the known universe will be unreachable. The answer is in the acceleration of expansion (which the blogpost mentioned but I didn't connect the dots on at first); eventually the rate of expansion ("velocity") will greater than the speed of light.

Wait, you mean the gang of armed thugs that extort money from people at the point of a gun, throwing them in a tiny rape cage if they disobey, and will abduct their own citizens to dose then with megadoses of psychedelics for weeks straight, while simultaneously operating a massive imperialist war machine...might be guilty of racketeering?

Come to think of it, you might be on to something!

I'm opposed to laws supporting unions in general. If workers want to voluntarily get together and agree to bargain collectively, that's great. That's really just individuals engaging in voluntary contracts.

The issue is the way unions work (or at least my understanding, correct me if wrong) is that in many places once a union has taken hold, they actually get the right to prevent a non-unionized worker for working. That's absolutely crazy to me (and evil, and inefficient).

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Note: The above doesn't mean that Elon doesn't treat his workers like shit - he does. I wish people would see through the cult of personality with him, because so many workers have sustained injuries on the job or just burnt themselves out for someone who really doesn't care about them.

The thing with trying to save humanity from existential threats, is ethically speaking you can justify sacrificing as many actual humans for the cause as necessary.

But yeah, unions aren't the mechanism to fix that.

Thanks for the link. (As an aside, the usage of the phrase "COVID-19 virus" in the paper really triggers me :P) Not sure if you were just sharing information or if there was an implication that it's at odds with what I said, but just to be explicit I consider that to confirm what I said above.

> It's still endemic today, but most of us get infected as youths which provides some immunity later in life.

Right! That's why it's really a great analogy for SARS-2. I've been trying to get people to understand for awhile now that unlike say a really bad flu pandemic [flu has a bi-modal death distribution], SARS-2 kills the very elderly and the very sickly, but doesn't touch the very young. That means that once it's more-or-less fully spread through the population (as it has been doing the last 1.5 years or so), we're basically done with COVID-19 mortality forever.

Why? Because of exactly that reason: children will get exposed to SARS-2 young the same way they get exposed to the other circulating non-SARS hCoVs. And like any infection, once infected and recovered immunological memory persists for decades upon decades. Memory B/T cells hang around, ready and waiting to respond to the characteristic antigen when presented with them in the future.

> What exactly would you consider a non-mild respiratory virus?

SARS-1 is an example of a non-mild respiratory virus. We don't know quite as much about it since it never became a massive global phenomenon the way SARS-2 did, but the research I've read basically indicates that a "run-of-the-mill" SARS-1 infection is much like a severe COVID-19 case.

People seem to really be taking issue with my statement, and I think it comes down to them conflating "mild respiratory virus for the majority of the population" with "mild respiratory virus for everyone". Here's one simple way to put it: if "asymptomatic COVID-19" (which is an oxymoron but I'll spare you that rant) is as common as they say it is, that's an indication that it is a mild respiratory virus in many people.

Basically any viral infection bears the risk of extended symptoms of fatigue/malaise - see the whole ME/CFS literature (note: there's considerable controversy as to whether it's "real" or not - I don't take a side in that fight).

Almost all "research" I've seen of so-called "long COVID" has been self-reported surveys from self-select internet populations; hopefully it's obvious why such "research" will end up dramatically overstating the prevalence. (Edit: Re-reading this the tone doesn't come across quite how I want it so to be clear I'm criticizing the research itself not denying that anyone experiences these symptoms)

Lastly, I do very much worry that the widespread culture of fear and stress - which has been actively encouraged rather than calmed down by health "experts" around the globe - is contributing to a type of psychogenic / psychosomatic illness. To be explicit, psychosomatic illness is a real illness, but it does mean that the underlying mechanism is not of physiological origin but rather psychoemotional stress/belief systems that ultimately culminate in physical symptoms.

Very sorry to hear that you're actively suffering from long COVID. I hope things get better for you. I struggle with a sort of chronic fatigue myself (not anywhere as severe as the ME/CFS type horror stories I hear about, but still) so I know how shitty it can be. I've always got a bunch of ideas bouncing around my head of new research directions, articles I want to write, etc, and it many times feels out of my control whether I'm going to have the energy to pursue those goals or not.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of containment-type policies (or the type of mitigation-but-with-all-the-downsides-of-containment like in my state of California), is that they put people into a physiological (and psychological) state where they are more vulnerable to disease:

- Vitamin D is a critical pro-hormone for immunoregulatory function in general and respiratory pathology specifically. In many ways severe COVID-19 is a disorder of immunoregulation. Vitamin D deficiency is already very widespread, and telling people to stay inside / not go out, and when going out to cover some exposed skin with a mask, is very obviously going to negatively impact Vitamin D as well as nitric oxide production/release respectively. Both are really important for respiratory pathology although Vitamin D is by far more important

- Decreased sleep, increased stress/fear, decreased exercise: all of these put the body into a pro-inflammatory state as well as a state in which immunoregulatory processes start to break down. Some stress/fear/sleep is unavoidable during a pandemic or epidemic but the vast majority of it is disproportionate to the reality of the situation and is a direct result of fear-based messaging from public health "experts", politicians, and the media.

(Remember when beaches were closed down? In many places gyms are still closed, etc)

- Improper wearing of masks (read: how literally every community member wears a mask) very plausibly increases the risk of bacterial pneumonia due to having a warm, moist cloth bacterial reservoir attached to both of one's breathing holes for long periods of time. This was a concern which was identified after the "Spanish" Flu of 1918 where the scientific consensus after the fact was that such usage of masking was both completely unfounded and likely contributed to bacterial pneumonia and other worsened outcomes. So many of the interventions (universal masking) we're advised or mandated to undertake increase a lot of these risks, which is doubly ironic when the wealth of research literature around masking for community transmission of respiratory viruses is at best inconclusive.

Okay, I had PCR and serology confirmed SARS-2 that was completely asymptomatic. I'm in my late 20's.

Numbers vary but most studies have the rate of asymptomaticity quite high. I've seen anything from 10% to 60%. And then you have the people that are "paucisymptomatic" (mild symptoms). And then you have a more traditional flu-type response, and then you have the subset of people who have a severe response that seems comparable to a SARS-1 infection (read: quite bad).

I didn't say that SARS-2 was never dangerous for anyone. So-called "cold" viruses can cause serious illness too. I'm not downplaying SARS-2, rather everyone else is downplaying what a normal cold virus can be capable of.

Sorry to hear about your friend's illness BTW.

> It is quite a neat way of using a blockchain to do something slightly more useful than the usual gambling. It's still gambling though.

This is nonsense. It's just another form of hysterical speculation.

The key to speculation is, if you know you're doing it, more power to you. But there are a lot of marks that think they're actually participating in something "legitimate".

This applies to more than just NFTs of course. One of the funnier things I stumbled across recently is "hoge" coin, which is a crypto "currency" that disincentivizes actually transacting in it, because every time you move money around you have to permanently burn off some of that money. See https://hoge.finance/. It reminds me of China's stock market where you can buy as much as you want, you just better not short sell and tank the price :)

SARS-2 was always destined to become yet another endemic seasonal respiratory virus, just to be clear.

Also, it basically is a cold virus already. For the majority of the population it’s a mild respiratory virus. For the very elderly it is quite deadly. I wish more people appreciated this fact.

Interestingly OC43, one of the already-extant human CoVs, seems pretty comparable in mortality for the elderly last time I checked.

Vaguely related, one of my biggest tax pet peeves (beyond people that don't understand marginal tax brackets at all) is the people who will cynically claim that a billionaire just donated to charity $X because they actually make more money from doing that because of the tax deduction. And it's like, no, they get to deduct it from their earned income, so they mathematically always end up with less money by donating it and deducting rather than just keeping it.

This comment got me laughing really hard, but since this is HN I'm going to try to figure out the answer anyway:

I think this scenario is pretty simple and is essentially just that you deduct the amount of money stolen from you from that year's income, provided you discovered the money was stolen that year. Obviously if you haven't discovered it's stolen yet you won't be deducting anything.

It seems that the tax evasion part essentially becomes totally irrelevant since, as others have said, you don't report evaded taxes as income, you just don't tell the IRS you owe those taxes and don't pay them, so from the IRS' perspective it's no different than you getting that quantity of non-evasion money stolen from you

Yeah it's a very transparent way to have an excuse to throw someone in jail. In a past life I had some illegal income that I briefly considered reporting. Paying taxes on money is way cheaper than laundering it anyway (which I was never big enough to need to do to be clear).

The IRS promises to keep any admissions of illegal income from other government agencies, but in practice that's total bullshit and so anyone with a serious criminal empire would be a total idiot to actually report those taxes. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

I've never understood how people view paying high taxes as a point of pride. Pay your taxes so violent men with guns don't throw you in a cage, sure. But to view it as a badge of honor when that money is half getting totally wasted and half very efficiently being used to kill people abroad...no, I'm not gonna applaud someone for pushing for more taxes.

You changed the goalposts. We're not discussing whether it's moral or not. We're discussing Stallman's comment that the interaction between Minksy and the girl was plausibly not sexual assault - specifically whether his comment was unreasonable or not.

Obviously I'm not endorsing having sex with one of Epstein's victims...